Mention Event

John Stezaker's "Marriage"at The Haggerty Museum of Art

Starts at 12:00 AM on March 18th, 2012

From the Haggerty:

John Stezaker Marriage
is an exhibition of nine "Film Portraits" made between 2009 and 2011
by the British conceptual artist John Stezaker (b. 1949). The artist
mined boxes of old photographs,
specifically vintage film stills and publicity shots of classic movie
stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age to create a new series of collages
that are simultaneously whimsical, ironic and uncanny.

Like the Cubist artists
before him, Stezaker is explicit about both his use of appropriated
material and his method of construction. By carefully splicing an
actor’s face from a bygone era and then placing it
over the portrait of another, he creates a caricature of the original
personalities. In some cases, the artist combined a photograph of a man
and a woman to create a "marriage"; in others, he uses two men, or two
women. The latter collages describe his
He and She series, which were a direct outgrowth of the original
Marriage series.

Since the scale of each
of the united portraits is similar, we read each collage as a unique
face. Rather than an ordinary flat photographic representation,
Stezaker’s faces are dynamic. Amusing and clever, each
image both complements and contradicts the historic portraits on which
they are based. By playing with the scale, pose and character, not to
mention the gender of the individuals represented, Stezaker gives his
modern icons a truly surreal yet human quality.

The Stezaker exhibition is funded with support from the Wisconsin Arts Board